Welcome to Authorized Sword Ministries. This is Lesson One of our course In the Beginning: The Truth About Creation. Today's lesson is called In the Beginning.

We're so glad you're here.

In this course we're going to open the Bible to the very first page and stand on it. Today we start with two things. First, what Genesis actually says. Second, where the idea of evolution came from, and who pushed it.

Our Key Verse

Today's key verse is the first verse in the Bible.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." — Genesis 1:1 (KJV)

Ten words, and they settle the biggest question there is. Before anything else existed, God was already there. He didn't come from the universe. The universe came from Him.

Part One: What Genesis Says

God Spoke, and It Was Done

Read Genesis chapter one and you'll notice right away that God doesn't struggle or experiment. He speaks.

"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." — Genesis 1:3 (KJV)

The psalmist saw the same thing:

"By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth." — Psalm 33:6 (KJV)

"For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast." — Psalm 33:9 (KJV)

The book of Hebrews tells us how we know this:

"Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." — Hebrews 11:3 (KJV)

And the Gospel of John tells us who that Word is:

"All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made." — John 1:3 (KJV)

The One who spoke the world into being is the Lord Jesus Christ. Creation isn't a side topic for Christians. It's about who Jesus is.

Six Real Days

Now, how long did God take? Genesis tells us plainly. Look at how the first day ends:

"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day." — Genesis 1:5 (KJV)

Every one of the six days ends the same way: "the evening and the morning." The word for day in Hebrew is yom. Like our English word "day," it can sometimes mean a general time, as when we say "back in my grandfather's day." But context always tells you which one is meant. Creation ministries like Answers in Genesis point out that everywhere else in the Old Testament, when yom comes with a number, like "the third day," or with "evening" and "morning," it means an ordinary day. Genesis 1 uses both, for all six days.

"And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day." — Genesis 1:31 (KJV)

"Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made." — Genesis 2:1-2 (KJV)

If there's any doubt left, God Himself settled it when He wrote the Ten Commandments with His own finger:

"For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it." — Exodus 20:11 (KJV)

Six days of work, one day of rest. That's our week. God built our calendar on His creation week. If those days were millions of years long, the commandment wouldn't make sense.

Man Made by God's Own Hand

Genesis chapter two zooms in on the sixth day and shows us how God made the first man:

"And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." — Genesis 2:7 (KJV)

Adam didn't climb up from the animals. He was formed by God and given life by God's own breath.

Jesus Believed Genesis

And here's what settles it for us. Jesus believed Genesis. When the Pharisees asked Him about marriage, He took them right back to creation:

"And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female," — Matthew 19:4 (KJV)

"But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female." — Mark 10:6 (KJV)

Notice that Jesus said "from the beginning of the creation," not billions of years after it. Man and woman were there at the beginning. If we trust Jesus to save our souls, we can trust Him on how the world began.

Part Two: Where Did Evolution Come From?

Now let's turn to the other story. Many people think Charles Darwin dreamed up evolution all by himself. He didn't. The Bible says:

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." — Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV)

An Old Idea

About six hundred years before Christ, a Greek philosopher named Anaximander taught that the first living things came out of moisture, and that man came from another kind of animal. Men were trying to explain the world without God long before there were laboratories.

In 1809, a French naturalist named Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published a book laying out his theory that living things change over time into higher forms. That was the same year Charles Darwin was born.

Darwin's Grandfather

But the idea was already in Darwin's own family. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a well-known English physician, inventor, and poet. He belonged to the Lunar Society, a club of scientists and industrialists who met in the Birmingham area. Between 1794 and 1796 he published a two-volume work called Zoonomia, which suggested that all warm-blooded animals might have come from a single living filament. Historians describe him as a freethinker, and he called himself a deist, meaning he believed in a creator who set the world running by natural laws, not the God who speaks to us in the Bible. Even in his own day, critics accused him of encouraging religious skepticism.

Charles read his grandfather's book as a young man. Years later he wrote in his autobiography that hearing such views "maintained and praised" early in life "may have favoured my upholding them under a different form in my Origin of Species."

Darwin's Father and Mother

His father, Robert Darwin, was a successful doctor. He kept his views quiet so as not to upset his church-going patients, but privately he was a freethinker. Charles himself later counted his father among those who did not believe.

His mother, Susannah, was the daughter of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood, and the Wedgwoods were Unitarians. Unitarians deny the Trinity. They do not believe that Jesus Christ is God. Susannah took her children to the Unitarian chapel in Shrewsbury, and young Charles went to a day school run by the Unitarian minister there. She died in July of 1817, when Charles was just eight years old.

So picture the home he grew up in. A grandfather who wrote about evolution. A father who didn't believe. A mother whose church denied the deity of Christ. That's not a foundation built on the Rock.

Trained for the Ministry

Now here's a part of the story that people get mixed up. Did Darwin really study to become a preacher? The honest answer is yes, and it's worth telling right.

In 1825 his father sent him to Edinburgh to study medicine. There he came under a teacher named Robert Grant, an admirer of Lamarck. But Charles hated medicine and left without a degree. His father didn't want him to become, in Charles's own words, "an idle sporting man," so he proposed that Charles become a clergyman in the Church of England.

In 1828 Charles went to Christ's College, Cambridge, and in 1831 he earned an ordinary bachelor's degree, the usual first step toward becoming a country parson. He never took the divinity training, and he was never ordained. Here's how he described his faith at the time:

"...as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted."

Then he added something very telling:

"It never struck me how illogical it was to say that I believed in what I could not understand..."

He said he "liked the thought of being a country clergyman." But listen to how his plan ended:

"Nor was this intention and my father's wish ever formally given up, but died a natural death when on leaving Cambridge I joined the Beagle as Naturalist."

Friend, that's the lesson right there. Darwin had a church plan. He had a Cambridge degree. He agreed with the creed. But there's no sign he ever truly knew Christ. His faith was borrowed and second-hand. Jesus said:

"Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." — John 3:3 (KJV)

A church career is not salvation. A religious family is not salvation. Only a new birth through faith in Jesus Christ is.

The Voyage and the Long Ages

The ship HMS Beagle sailed from England on December 27, 1831. Darwin took along the first volume of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, given to him by the ship's captain. Lyell taught that the earth was shaped by slow, gradual processes over vast ages. That idea left no room for the worldwide Flood of Noah's day. Darwin later wrote that the very first place he studied showed him "the wonderful superiority of Lyell's manner of treating geology." Before Darwin ever said a word about animals changing, Lyell had already given him millions of years.

The Finch Myth

You may have heard the story. Darwin lands on the Galapagos Islands, sees finches with different beaks on each island, and suddenly realizes evolution is true and gives up God. It isn't what happened.

The Beagle visited the Galapagos in 1835. Darwin didn't recognize the finches as a group of close relatives. He thought some of them were wrens, grosbeaks, and blackbirds. And he didn't label most of his birds by which island they came from. It was only back in London, early in 1837, that a bird expert named John Gould told the Zoological Society they were a whole new group of ground finches. Darwin then had to rely on birds his shipmates had labeled to work out which island was which.

There was no lightning-bolt moment on an island. Darwin worked out his theory privately over the next couple of years, between 1837 and 1839.

Disbelief Crept In

His faith didn't fall all at once either. He wrote that on board the Beagle he was still "quite orthodox." But in the years after he came home, he began to doubt the Bible, and where did he start? With Genesis. He wrote that he had come to see the Old Testament as having a "manifestly false history of the world." First he threw out the beginning. Then the rest followed. In his own words:

"Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete."

In 1851 his beloved daughter Annie died at just ten years old. It broke his heart. But historians who have studied his papers show that his faith had already been slipping away for years before that.

In 1859 he published On the Origin of Species. Late in life he described himself as an agnostic, someone who says we can't know whether God exists.

Darwin's Bulldog

Darwin was a quiet, private man. Others did the public fighting for him. The loudest was a biologist named Thomas Henry Huxley, who became known as "Darwin's bulldog." Huxley is the man who coined the very word "agnostic."

In 1864 Huxley and eight friends formed a London dining club called the X Club. For nearly thirty years they used their positions in science and education to defend Darwin and push a view of nature with no room for the God of the Bible. They wanted scientists, rather than the clergy, to be the ones people looked to for answers, and they pushed for their kind of science to be taught at every level of education.

So when someone tells you evolution is just what the facts show, remember where it came from. It came from pagan philosophy, from a freethinking grandfather, from a home without the true Christ, from a man who doubted Genesis first, and from friends who worked hard to push God out of the classroom.

"Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ." — Colossians 2:8 (KJV)

What This Means for Us

We don't share this to mock Darwin. We share it as a warning. Here was a man who grew up around religion, studied for the ministry, and once said he believed every word of the Bible. But he never truly knew the Lord, and once he let go of Genesis, he let go of all of it.

That's why Genesis matters. If the first page isn't true, why trust the last page? But it is true. God spoke, and it was done. In six days He made heaven and earth. He formed man from the dust and breathed life into him. And when sin came, that same Creator came to this earth as a man to save us.

In the lessons ahead, we'll look at the evidence, from the heavens to the worldwide Flood, and you'll see that the facts fit the Bible.

A Simple Step for This Week

Read Genesis chapters one and two this week. Read them slowly, maybe out loud. Each time you see "the evening and the morning," stop and thank God that He told us the truth about where we came from.

And if you've been religious but never born again, don't stop where Darwin stopped. Settle it with God today.

"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." — Romans 10:9 (KJV)

A Prayer

Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father,

Thank You that in the beginning, You created the heaven and the earth. Thank You that You made us on purpose, in Your image, by Your own hand.

Lord, guard every person listening from the philosophy and vain deceit of this world. Give us a love for Your Word, starting on the very first page.

And for anyone who has known about You, but never truly known You, draw them to Jesus today. Help them to be born again.

"Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." — Revelation 4:11 (KJV)

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Thank you for spending this time with us. In our next lesson, we'll look up at the heavens and answer the Big Bang.

This is Authorized Sword Ministries. God bless you.